Meet Obama's pollsters

As President Barack Obama works to sell the American people on a sweeping agenda of domestic spending and policy changes, he’s relying on three men who have gone through neither Senate confirmation nor cable news spin cycles.

Data from pollsters Joel Benenson and Paul Harstad has become increasingly important to shaping the White House’s message as the crucial battle over the president’s budget intensifies.

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“The pace [of polling] is picking up,” said one source familiar with the data.

In addition, David Binder, a San Francisco-based focus group expert, also has been traveling the country taking the national temperature on issues like energy and health care, others close to the White House said.

Presidents have long pooh-poohed polls while privately conducting them. Jimmy Carter had Patrick Caddell, Reagan had Dick Wirthlin, and Bill Clinton relied on Mark Penn for weekly, personal briefings on the numbers.

George W. Bush, reacting against Clinton’s perceived reliance on polls, sharply cut back the practice, according to spending tallies. His main pollster was the no-profile Jan van Lohuizen, but Karl Rove still conducted six major surveys a year, a senior Bush White House staffer said, and employed an aide to pore over the growing pile of publicly available data.

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Obama, too, has denounced polling, promising in one high-profile Iowa speech to lead “not by polls, but by principle,” even though he employed six campaign pollsters.

A political aide, Larry Grisolano, confirmed the outlines of the White House polling operation, which is paid for through the Democratic National Committee.

“Harstad and Benenson poll for the DNC, which shares data with some folks in the admin[istration], as has been the practice in past administrations,” he said in an email.

Obama, early indications suggest, combines elements of the Clinton and Bush models. He is polling more than Bush – a bit less than once a week for most of his young term, two people involved said.

Elements of Obama’s approach bear the hallmarks of message testing, like the introduction of the words “recovery” and “reinvestment” to rebrand the “stimulus” package, and aides said the polling has focused almost entirely on selling policy, not on measuring the president’s personal appeal.

A source familiar with the data said a central insight of more recent polling had been that Americans see no distinction between the budget and the popular spending measures that preceded it, and that the key to selling the budget has been to portray it as part of the “recovery” measures.

But Obama, though polling regularly, is no Clinton either. The 42nd president studied the polls from Penn and his partners Doug Schoenpolls with “hypnotic intensity,” the Washington Post once wrote. Obama leaves political guru David Axelrod to sift through the results.

Indeed, the polling arrangement offers a glimpse into the power dynamics of the Obama White House. Axelrod convenes a Wednesday political meeting and is in regular contact with the pollsters, but the pollsters don’t brief Obama directly.

Internally, they bolster Axelrod’s power rather than challenging it.

“Axelrod digests all the polling,” said another Democrat who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House doesn’t want to call attention to its polling.

Benenson, Harstad, and Binder all worked for Obama’s campaign, and they’re all outside-the-beltway figures, with relatively low public profiles.